Cheat Sheets: Part Three

The first nine steps in my process for creating entries for the Early New England Families Study Project are covered here and here.

10. Town Histories, Genealogical Dictionaries, Town Records (Town). I can access almost any classic published history on-line, many of..

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Cheat Sheets: Part Two

In a recent post I mentioned the Early New England Families Study Project “template” that I use: a Word document file with the categories pre-typed. I keep it on my desktop to open and “save as” the new file name each time I start a new family. For those of you who are..

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Cheat Sheets

I create cheat sheets for projects, but most of them reside inside my head or on scattered pieces of paper in my office – both of which suffer from notorious clutter issues – so it seems like a good exercise to gather and record the process here. In this case, of..

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William Aspinwall, Boston notary 1641-51

Notarization is a legal process meant to deter document fraud. It involves authenticating the person or persons who are signing a document, certifying that they did sign, and keeping records of what was notarized. When the first settlers arrived in New England, there..

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Mothers-in-law and "new print" searches

Complementing my last post about researching other spouses of spouses, this week we add mothers-in-law.  No sooner had the new Early New England Families Study Project sketch on William Hilton been posted when a sharp observer (“Westtrack”) wrote in with a correction...

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Other spouses of spouses

Five new Early New England Families Study Project sketches have just been posted:

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Ear marks and horse censuses

In the days when livestock mostly roamed loose in New England towns, it was critical that farmers could identify which animals belonged to them – to avoid disputes, identify stolen property, or recover damages if your crops were ruined by the neighborhood’s hogs. While..

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Sandwich and Eastham Town Records

You know you are a genealogist when the highlight of your week is the delivery of two newly published volumes of town records! These are The Town Records of Eastham during the Time of Plymouth Colony, 1620-1692, and The Town Records of Sandwich during the Time of..

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The Great Migration Study Project: a primer, Part Three

Here is a table to help sort out where to look for your seventeenth-century ancestors in the publications associated with the Great Migration Study Project and the Early New England Families Study Project:

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The Great Migration Study Project: a primer, Part Two

Three volumes of The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, and seven volumes of the “second series” Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, have been published since 1995. Two “spin-off” volumes – The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants..

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